Blog

Categories

Search

Category: News

Facebook Instant Articles has been around for almost three years. Since launching with several partners in 2015, more than 10,000 publishers now use the format worldwide. And according to Facebook, Instant Articles “pays out more than $1 million per day to publishers via Facebook Audience Network.”

Author and publisher Ian Lamont has used StatCounter since 2006 to help monitor his blogs and publishing websites. He recently used StatCounter to identify suspicious activity associated with a Google AdWords campaign. We invited him to tell his story.

Digital advertising fraud is a big deal, siphoning off billions from advertisers each year. However, mobile and online ad fraud is not just an issue for big-box retailers, Hollywood movie studios, auto manufacturers, and other giant companies which depend on digital advertising to drive sales. Small businesses can also get cheated, and may not even know it. Even worse, the tools provided on Google’s popular AdWords service are wholly inadequate to detect the problem, and are actually likely to increase the likelihood of becoming a victim. In the following post, I will describe how I used StatCounter to detect suspicious clicks on a new AdWords campaign for a new book, and the steps I am taking to limit fraud on all of my Google AdWords campaigns in the future.

Google is always tight-lipped about the changes they make to their algorithm, however, the change on March 7th/8th was large enough for many website owners and digital marketing firms to notice substantial changes in traffic and rankings. This new algorithm update, simply known as “Fred”, is believed to primarily target websites with low-quality content and backlinks. Often, these two factors occur simultaneously and on websites that have utilized SEO companies to quickly build low-quality content and backlinks.

Google has confirmed the Fred algorithm update, but they were weary of giving too much information about it. The only clue given to website owners was that Fred targeted websites that were not abiding by the webmaster guidelines. Based on our research here at StatCounter, we have determined that sites with low-quality content and unnatural backlinks, purely meant to drive revenue have been the most hurt by this update.

Here are five things you can do right now to see if you were affected and start recovering any lost rankings and traffic

Our lifetime summary stats allow you to keep track of the number of Page Views, Unique Visits and Returning Visits since you added your project to StatCounter. These stats are independent of your normal log size, have no storage limit and are recorded on a daily basis, allowing you to see weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly totals.

If a visitor to your website has 5 page views in the morning, and returns to your website later that day for another 3 pageviews, we record this as 2 Unique Visits for that day. On another day, if you have 2 different people viewing your site in the morning, this would also be recorded as 2 Unique Visits.

Recently we’ve been working on adding a new stat to record distinct visitors to your site, so that in the above example, you’d see 1 visitor for the first day and 2 visitors for the second day. The terminology between ‘Visits’ and ‘Visitors’ could be confusing though, so we are proposing to rename ‘Unique Visits’ to ‘Sessions’ in advance of adding the new stat. Let us know what you think in the poll below!

Current: Unique Visits (New Visitors stat will be in pink)

Proposed: Rename Unique Visits to Sessions

Note: Returning Visits hasn’t been shown in these screenshots, but it would likely be renamed to Returning Sessions.

We’d really love your feedback about what terminology you like the best and find easiest to understand. Please post your preferences in the poll below and let us know your thoughts in the comments!